Just a little guide to help people out on how to rank fighter skills just in case the large number of skills becomes too confusing. It’s really a suggestion on ranking priority of skills to get more efficiency out of them. They’re determined through usefulness, efficiency and difficulty/length of training time.

Well basically, you’ve got two passives, six actives and two support skills; quite a bit to manage no?

For those who don’t know, almost every skill has 3 break points where it will receive a large bonus in one rank for little change in ap cost. These are rank 9, 5 and 1; for those who don’t want to progress too far into a skill without dumping too much ap, hitting rank 9 or 5 should be a good goal to aim towards.

Passives
Between your two passives; Knuckle Mastery and Chain Mastery, Chain Mastery should always hold ranking priority over knuckle mastery. Actually, it’s not only Knuckle Mastery; it’s ranking priority is always held above every other fighter skill because it gives will, additional damage on all chain skills in terms of percentage and eventually lowers cooldowns as well.

Knuckle Mastery; just rank it if you feel like it since it’s contribution for it’s ap isn’t as good as chain mastery. For the ap conservative people, I’d say rank 9 should be a pretty good spot to have it in since it only costs 23 ap.

Actives
There are 6 active skills which are then broken down into groups of two called stages.

Stage 1 includes Charging Strike and Focused Fist, stage 2 consists of Spinning Uppercut and Somersault Kick while stage 3 is made up of Dropkick and Pummel.

Within each stage will always have two types of skills which are specifically used for either utility or damage. For convenience’s sake, the listing of active skills above is already listed down as utility and damage respectively. In the later ranks, utility skills will always take longer to train as they have stricter training requirements (such as Spinning Uppercut’s “Use the skill successfully” requirement turning into “Get a Critical Hit with Spinning Uppercut”, you’ll notice that all utility skills have training requirements based on critical hits) and therefore they should always hold priority in ranking over damage based skills.

For those who have no idea what I’m talking about when I say “utility skills”, I mean to say that they are often more useful in certain situations over the damage skills which merely have a higher damage multiplier (and lengthier animations).

-Charging Fist is used to quickly enter a combo and break your opponent’s momentum without any delay (Note: Focused Fist can be used as a short ranged Charging Fist if you just tap the skill hotkey prior to choosing your direction with your cursor).
-Spinning Uppercut is most often a fighter’s favored skill to use early in a fight because of it’s defense and protection debuff.
-Drop Kick is the fighter’s only AoE attack and behaves similarly to a Falcon’s fire Elven Magic Missile.

There will be no problems ranking these skills from F to 9 training wise and since they don’t cost very much ap to rank, feel free to take your stage 1 and 2 skills into rank 9 since it only costs 102 ap. I feel that your stage 3 skills should have the lowest priority in ranking because as they are the last attacks in your chain, they will be the skills that will be used the least often. Not to mention that due to their longer cooldowns and lengthy training requirements, it’ll take quite a while to actually be given the opportunity to rank them.

In terms of ranking, I’d say that stage 2 skills should always hold priority over stage 1 and likewise over stage 3 due to availability of use during combat and ap costs. Stage 2 holds priority over stage 1 because of it’s higher difficulty of ranking and impressive damage output for a moderate amount of ap. Keep in mind that stage 1 skills don’t have the aforementioned rank 9, 5 and 1 breakpoints but stage 2 skills do (although Spinning Uppercut lacks one for rank 9).

As for stage 3 skills, I’d only recommend taking Pummel to rank 9 because it’s growth is very slow from there on while it costs a lot to rank. Additionally, leaving it till later isn’t that bad because it’s training requirement is very easy to fulfill. The transition from rank A to rank 9 is also a gigantic step as compared to other ranks (160% increase as compared to 10% for all other ranks except for 1; Pummel has no break point at rank 5). Drop Kick lacks a break point for rank 5 as well but instead starting at rank 9, it’s growth will become faster and faster from 20% from rank F to 9, 30% from rank 9 to 6 and 40% from rank 6 to 1. For both skills, I’d recommend staying at rank 9 until you feel that your stage 1 and 2 skills are progressing far too slowly in training (good way to tell is if over a couple rebirths, you’re actually gaining ap faster than you are losing it).

Support

There’s really no contest here, Tumble is just so much better than Respite that there’s not much to be explained.

Tumble’s distance moved per rank is a linear growth of 0.2 m (or 20 distance) per rank up. What isn’t linear is cooldown time, stamina use and speed of the tumble. Where do they change the most dramatically? If you’ve been paying attention to the guide, then you’ll know that it’s in the break points. Interestingly enough, Tumble has four break points with the first one starting in rank D. Basically every time you want to rank Tumble, you should always have enough to carry it to the next break point because that’s where any dramatic change will take place. Since Tumble does take a long time to rank, I’d say get to rank 9 asap for functionality and ap cost’s sake and then progress from there on at your own pace.

If you’re going to rank Respite, be prepared to throw at least 99 ap into it before it even starts to get useful because rank 7 when hp recovery begins to pick up (and both hp and stam regen assumes a linear growth pattern). Poison removal starting at rank 9 is nice but there’s a rather low chance of it occurring unless you’re prepared to dump a lot of ap into the skill. Not many mobs will have poisoning in the first place and in most of those situations where you’re being poisoned, you’ll suffer most of the poison’s drawbacks while in the fight itself since it would be suicide to attempt respite in a fight. There’s also the fact that if you don’t manage to cure poison the first try, the poison would already be gone before you get a second attempt at it.